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Wow! Just saw opened this thread today, and it reminded me of a study on paintball concepts I was working with someone a long time ago.

Before I ever got into "advanced" spud stuff I use to collaborate with custom marker makers over at pbnation.com to come up with crazy and new ideas for marker internals....

This exact idea was an iteration of a design we came up with a while back - 6 years ago. I sourced out the "pancake" solenoid, did all the power calculations and everything - it turned out to be nowhere near worth it compared to a normal air operation.

Here's a pic of the idea back then - before I had any advanced 3D cad knowledge. The baby blue portion on the back of the gun is the pancake solenoid. It required about 9V and a few amps to generate the same force as the more commonly used weighted pneumatic cylinder. There was another draw back - Duty cycle - it was no where near capable of performing with the fast acting air cylinders. So you could maybe squeeze a string of 20BPS out but it wouldn't hold that for a while without overheating and/or killing the batteries quick - which were even the higher capacity li-po batteries.

I always thought a paintball gun doesn´t need to be moded at all, there are a lot designers who have probably already calculated everything Anyway, I did a quick GGDT about this valve with 400 and 800 psi, with 0.25g airsoft bb, 400 psi I may get 800 ft/s, while 800 psi will go up to 1100ft/s I really hope the finished gun can do that.
So I went to a online paintball store where I use to buy my parts. I was looking for air regulators. There are 3000 to 400 psi ones and 3000 to 800 ones. My question is the 3000 to 400 ones can be regulated to 3000 to 800 ? If it could, it´s a lot better choice than the 3000 to 800 ones, as I can use the gun in low power and high power for different proposes. Thanks

Hi everybody.
During last two weeks I have been testing and adjusting the solenoid+valve system. It wasn't reliable at all, sometime open sometimes doesn't. Apparently jack was right about the hammer issue, the solenoid has a great holding power when fully opened, almost enough to activate a blowgun. But if I put little weight on it before it's activated, it won't move. After checking the black bird airgun valve, looks like that valve needs much less travel space to open. So I actually only need the valve to block the feeding of bb from the magazine, half of the bb's diameter will be enough to do that. I will make the valve more sensitive to the solenoid, probably only 0.4 cm to open, but if somebody have constructive opinion, feel free to share. I will post some picture about the solenoid.
Btw dewey-1, the solenoid's resistance it's 15.5 ohm

Didn't know this way of making a spring :p looks simple and as almost all my friends play guitar I should find a nice string. So after the heating process it stays in a definitive spring shape? What's the temperature needed for that?
Got a spring now, a picture of the prototype. As soon as the epoxy cures, I will up load a video.